So Jennifer Aniston didn’t get an Oscar nomination for her performance, but Cake proves the one-time Friends star has more dark layers than a black-forest bakeoff. Taking on the role of Claire, a hostile and depressive car-crash survivor, Aniston added a few extra pounds to her lean frame, but the bigger transformation takes place above the neck because Claire is nothing like the typical Aniston persona.

Sarcastic, mean and frequently cruel, Claire, given her penchant for pill-popping, isn’t the kind of person who would be called ‘America’s Sweetheart’ or ‘Your New Best Friend.’

Claire is so nasty, the people in her support group politely ask her to leave, and she obliges. Yet, one group member won’t let her go. Nina (Anna Kendrick) was a young mother who killed herself before the action in the film even begins, but Claire continues to see her cocky, smirking ghost.

It pops up everywhere, taunting Claire with thoughts of suicide and gory disaster scenarios, forcing our conflicted heroine to face two ugly truths: One, her addiction to antidepressants and pain medication may be making her delusional. And two, she’s obsessed with self-harm.

Jennifer Aniston in a scene from Cake. [Cinelou Films ]

Claire needs a lot of help, but like so many people trapped in the corner of self-loathing, she’s reluctant to get it because that would mean admitting to an unhealthy pattern, as well as taking responsibility for her own feelings.

And right now, Claire is a volatile blame thrower. She’d rather hurl incendiary insults at everyone around her than show a little compassion for herself and others, but over the course of this Daniel Barnz drama, things begin to shift.

It’s a subtle slide upward, but it’s palpable because we spend most of the movie watching Claire behave like a deep-sea crustacean: Slowly drifting across the ocean floor, mechanically pecking at smaller life forms from inside her hard carapace.

She doesn’t seem emotionally invested in anything, which explains why she’s separated from her husband and has casual sex with the pool boy.

Claire is so nasty, the people in her support group politely ask her to leave, and she obliges.

As viewers, it should be hard to empathize with anyone so vacant and selfish. It’s not, though, because even if we don’t know exactly what happened to Claire, we know she bears the scars of severe trauma. We can see them on her face: deep cuts slowly resolving into raised white lines of scar tissue. She doesn’t talk about them, nor do any of the people around her. Like everything else about Claire and her situation, it’s the things she won’t say that matter most.

The psychology is pretty basic, and so is the plot line, but the performances pull out every incomprehensible paradox that constitutes the human condition. Whether it’s Sam Worthington’s go-for-broke honesty in the role of Nina’s widower, Adriana Barraza’s feistiness in the part of Claire’s housekeeper Silvana, or Aniston’s full surrender to the self-effacing impulses of survivor guilt, every character gets injected with a full dose of personality that only grows more intense with pain.

To Barnz’s credit, he doesn’t push on the bruised spots to elicit a monstrous catharsis or a big revelation. All the action grows organically out of character and a surprisingly stubborn life force that urges us to get out of our premix boxes, and start from scratch.